Tim Farron is a reminder of what it actually means to be liberal

The media complain about ‘career politicians’. Yet when politicians come along who aren’t Oxford PPEists, who have progressed via think tanks and spadships to safe seats without their feet touching the ground, journalists are shocked by their failure to conform to contemporary mores.

We want politicians to be different, it seems, as long as they stay the same. Tim Farron is that rarity in modern life: a senior politician from the north of England. The north has become the British equivalent of America’s flyover states, lost in the no-man’s land between the centres of real power in London and Edinburgh. Farron did not leave it until he came to Westminster. He was born in Preston, and educated at Runshaw College in Leyland and Newcastle University. He worked as a teacher in Lancaster and Ambleside before becoming MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale. He is also an evangelical Christian.

There was a time when no one who knew the North would be surprised.